At a White House press conference on Tuesday morning, the President officially
announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies
Initiative, otherwise known as the BRAIN Initiative, which he briefly
mentioned during his State of Union address earlier this year. The funding
for the project will be included in the President’s 2014 budget request that
he will submit to Congress next week.

“As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away; we can study particles
smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three
pounds of matter that sits between our ears,” said President Obama. He
believes that the BRAIN initiative will change that by “giving scientists
the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action.” With
such tools, researchers can better understand how neurodegenerative
disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease affect brain
function.

The funding for the project will be split between three federal science
agencies, namely the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science
Foundation (NSF). Additional funding will come from private companies,
foundations, and research institutes. For example, the Allen Institute for
Brain Science plans to spend $60 million a year on projects related to this
initiative, according to the White
House.

Following the State of the Union address, the New York Times reported
in February that the administration was planning a
decade-long project to map human brain activity. Those initial reports
were met with criticism by scientists who questioned not only the scientific
merits of the project but also the detrimental effects that funding such a
large initiative could have on smaller basic research projects and grant
availability.

How government agencies such as the NIH and NSF spend their funding has become
an increasingly contentious issue over the past few years as flat budgets
and inflation have chipped away at support for basic research. And recently,
the sequester has made this argument all the more heated by reducing science
agency budgets, leaving many to question whether the timing is right to
launch such a costly initiative.

“The reality is that we can’t afford not to,” said NIH director Francis
Collins, who introduced President Obama at the White House press conference.
“The worst thing that we could do is to stifle innovative research. It’s
that innovation that holds immense potential.”

But the criticism might have been enough for the White House to scale back
from a long-term commitment and to focus instead on a one-year, initial
phase for the project.

In addition, the goal of the project is not a high-resolution map of human
brain activity, as reported previously, but rather to develop tools that
could help scientists map this activity. In an online article
published last week, BioTechniques took a look at some of the promising
neuroscience technologies that one day might be used to map the activity
in the human brain.

In the end, the development of such high-throughput neurotechnologies might
have a greater impact than a single brain activity map, just as the Human
Genome Project’s biggest contribution to science is arguably the
high-throughput sequencing technologies developed during that period.

In a follow-up press conference at the White House on Tuesday, Collins was
asked whether the BRAIN Initiative could be this generation’s space race.
“The race part worries me a bit,” said Collins who believes that
international collaboration rather than competition will produce the best
results. But that would be in contrast to the Human Genome Project, in which
Collins and the NIH were locked in a race-to-the-finish with Craig Venter’s
privately-funded human genome sequencing project.

For now, the President’s 2014 budget will be delivered to Capitol Hill next
week where it will need to be approved by both houses of Congress.